The Stoep Garden

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Why should we grow food for our loved ones?

Researcher Lindsay Sheehan claims that store-bought produce isn’t as nutritious as in the 1950s. From then on, modern farming practices concentrated increasingly on the size of fruits and vegetables, yield, growth rate, and pest resistance. The concentration of essential and healthy nutrition moved into second place.

Sadly, today’s average vegetable purchased in supermarkets contains anywhere from 5% to 40% fewer nutrients. You would need to eat eight oranges today for the same amount of vitamin A that a single orange provided two generations ago.

The leading cause of nutrient loss is growing foods in poor soils and harvesting them before maturity. The “dilution effect” is a phenomenon where the bigger the fruit and the more crop the plant yields, the less protein, amino acids, minerals, and vitamins are present in them. 

However, when we grow our food, we ultimately control the process. We can enrich the soil with organic matter, harvest food when it reaches peak maturity, and choose to grow cultivars that give us the most nutritional bang for our buck.